


and the history books forgot about us

by andromedaries



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Black Family Madness (Harry Potter), Character Study, Drinking, Gen, If You Squint - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Lucius Malfoy in Azkaban, Malfoy Manor, Minor Lucius Malfoy/Narcissa Black Malfoy, Narcissa Black Malfoy-centric, POV Narcissa Black Malfoy, Post-War, Redeemed Draco Malfoy, The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, brain vomit tbh, i guess?, idk man i was just in my feels about narcissa after the war, it's really just narcissa and draco the other characters are just mentioned, its mostly just her navel-gazing, just a lil not a lot, narcissa decides to try to reconcile with andromeda after the war, no plot head empty, problematic faves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:15:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27903562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andromedaries/pseuds/andromedaries
Summary: "'It kept you out of Azkaban,' she points out dryly. 'And thank goodness for that.' Because I don’t know what I’d do here all alone, she doesn’t have to add. For 25 whole years. And for a second, she’s terribly afraid of what will happen if her son gets this job and moves away. She won’t blame him - after all the danger she put him in, she knows she has no argument if he takes issue with her parenting. But 25 years, alone. Without the constant company she usually entertains, to keep her mind busy. Without her husband, who, regardless of what she’s feeling about him now, will not see her again for 25 years, when she’s 66 and he’s 70. And for a second, no matter what her better judgments tell her, she’s unmoored by the expanse of years stretching before her, the crushing isolation that will be her only companion through them."The Malfoys have always known how to play for the team that's winning. But somehow this time, they played all the right cards and still came up short.How will Narcissa weather the next 25 years while Lucius is in Azkaban?
Relationships: Bellatrix Black Lestrange & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Bellatrix Black Lestrange & Narcissa Black Malfoy & Andromeda Black Tonks, Draco Malfoy & Narcissa Black Malfoy, Lucius Malfoy/Narcissa Black Malfoy, Narcissa Black Malfoy & Andromeda Black Tonks, Teddy Lupin & Draco Malfoy
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	and the history books forgot about us

**Author's Note:**

> just some words rattling around in my head about my problematic fave grudgingly figuring out the new world order. narcissa is so realistic to me and i feel like there's a lot of unexplored potential for complexity in her character.  
> title is from samson by regina spektor but u already knew that didn't u lol

It was strange, after the war, after the trials. Their instincts told them to run, to stick together and start over. Their instincts had always kept them safe, the ones that compelled them to look out for their own, forsaking all else. But even the Malfoys couldn’t keep running forever. The best lawyer their money and tarnished status could buy had represented them at their trials, and done even more than they had reasonably hoped; leveraging their defection from the final battle, Draco's lie about the Potter boy's identity, and Narcissa’s lie about him being dead, the lawyer had gotten their sentences drastically reduced. The two of them owed many forfeited privileges and many galleons in fines, but they had gotten off easy. Lucius was not so lucky. Narcissa had the benefit of never having taken the Mark to begin with, and Draco was tried as a minor despite being 17 due to what the Wizengamot referred to as “considerable coercion.” Lucius’s only defenses were having fallen out of Voldemort’s favor toward the end, and abandoning the battle at Hogwarts with his family rather than staying to fight. But such defenses could not hold up to his sins in servitude to Voldemort, and his trial ended with the crash of the gavel declaring his 25 year sentence in Azkaban. 

Narcissa and Draco returned to the manor without much idea of what they were supposed to do with themselves. Draco had all but finished school now; all his classes were completed, only the final exams were lacking due to the school erupting into battle right when they should have been administered. It was September now, and Hogwarts was offering exams by mail to last year’s students whose exams had been supplanted by the war. Draco poured himself into studying for them, because it was easier than thinking about what awaited him when they were done; who would hire an ex-death eater now? Sure, his family was rich, he didn’t HAVE to work. He could easily just stay in his parents’ mansion indefinitely, with his aching mother and the echoing absence of his father. But the thought of it also kind of felt like falling off a cliff with nothing to catch him but his father’s unmet expectations and his mother’s pity. And her boredom, and her loneliness, and her longing for a warm home and respectable family that was everything they were before, and everything they aren’t anymore. 

She used to bury her whole life into entertaining, hosting the high society she loved so much in the mansion she prided herself on keeping so beautiful. Dinner parties at Malfoy Manor were among the most anticipated in all of English pureblood society, and Narcissa was the most perfect host, with her flawless composure and her immaculate home, her respected husband and her charming son. 

End up on the wrong side of a war and all that goes away. The Malfoys have always known how to play for the team that’s winning, but somehow this time, they played all the right cards and still came up short. All the friends from their circles are either in Azkaban like Lucius, or keeping their heads down in the new world order that has only grudgingly made room for the likes of Narcissa and Draco.

So Draco owls in his exams, and Narcissa paces around the mansion with a glass of deep red wine that never seems to run dry, and they send letters to their friends who they’re still afraid to gather in person with, many of whom also have family in Azkaban. The summer full of trials is long over, and the autumn stretches before them indefinitely, interminably, meaninglessly. 

Draco considers writing to his father in Azkaban, and can’t think of anything to say. Narcissa watches him struggle with all the things about Lucius that she’s struggled with for years. When it came down to it, her husband would put his family above all else. But in the mean time.... he habitually valued his pride and dignity over compassion, and it left little room for warmth. For the teenager she’d been when she first noticed him, his composure had been alluring; for the twenty year old she’d been when she married him, his quick wit was intoxicating. For the woman she is now, forty something and a mother and a leftover from a war that couldn’t decide which side to put her on, she feels a strange guilty mixture of loss and liberation at the prospect of her husband’s 25 year sentence.

She tells Draco about it, once, while he’s sitting at the kitchen table filling out an application for a job at the store in Diagon Alley that sells broomsticks. She swallows back the bile that rises in her throat at the thought of her own son doing such menial work as retail. But she knows their name has fallen from the grace it once had, and she can't bear to watch him keep languishing in this house with nothing to do. At least a job would keep his sharp restless mind occupied, and he had always loved flying. The broomstick store isn’t the worst thing that could happen to them.

She pours a second glass of wine this time when she refills her own, and sets it down by his stack of parchments. “Broomsticks, hm?” she says, just to say something. They don’t have much to say to each other these days, and it hurts her heart. She and her son had always been close, and now she could barely reach him in that far off place that his eyes go. 

“Thought it might not be too bad. If I can’t fly the brooms myself, I suppose selling them’s the next best thing.” 

She smiles wryly, thinking of her husband's days on the quidditch team back in school, and his own fantasies of going pro someday. 

“You’ve got all his better traits, you know that?” she tells him, a sad smile on her tired face, and she doesn’t have to say who she’s talking about for him to understand. “And yet somehow you managed to turn out more decent than either of us, without even trying.” 

Draco sips from the wine in front of him, more deeply than she's seen him do before. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t,” he mumbles, “for all the good it’s done me. More bloody trouble than it’s worth, most of the time.” 

“It kept you out of Azkaban,” she points out dryly. “And thank goodness for that.” Because I don’t know what I’d do here all alone, she doesn’t have to add. Tor 25 whole years. And for a second, she’s terribly afraid of what will happen if her son does get this job and move away. She won’t blame him - after all the danger she put him in, she knows she has no argument if he takes issue with her parenting. But 25 years, alone. Without the constant company she usually entertains, to keep her mind busy. Without her husband, who, regardless of what she’s feeling about him now, will not see her again for 25 years, when she’s 66 and he’s 70. And for a second, no matter what her better judgments tell her, she’s unmoored by the vast expanse of years stretching before her, and the crushing isolation that will be her only companion through them. 

She goes across the kitchen for a refill, sagging more heavily into the countertop than she means to. Then the swirling churn of her thoughts is broken by the footsteps behind her, and suddenly her son is there, arms around her waist, chin resting on her shoulder, face leaning into her white-streaked hair. He’s grown so much more than she’d realized, tall and wiry-strong just like his father. She leans against her son, hating Lucius, missing Lucius. Their marriage had always been... complex. And yet somehow here was Draco, with all their complexity and all their resentment and all their fiercely defiant love for each other, somehow more decent than either of them could have ever taught him to be. 

“I won’t leave you here alone, Mum.” 

And as quickly as those words reassure her, she forces them away again - it may be too late for the world to forgive her and Lucius, but her son deserves a second chance. “Rubbish,” she answers, “we’ll get you your own place in London when you start at the quidditch supply shop. You can’t stay holed up out here with a suspended apparition license.”

“And what, leave you here on house arrest alone? I’ll take the floo, Mother.”

And it breaks her heart, just a bit. Because it won’t be like last time, when the house had been humming with the regathering of Voldemort’s followers, whispering their grand plans, whispering the imminent liberation of her husband and sister from prison. It breaks her heart, because part of her is desperately afraid of the splinters she’s sure her mind will crack into if she’s alone, rattling around in the empty manor, her only company the Black-blooded madness she’s sure she’ll finally inherit in the absence of the Malfoy men. But the rest of her knows her son deserves better than she can give him anymore, knows beyond a shadow of a doubt she can’t subject her son to anything more than she already has. 

“I suppose it’s your decision, dear. But I cant help but think that at this point, the best thing for you might be a... fresh start.” 

Draco’s silence is something of an answer, she supposes. He hugs her a bit tighter for a moment, then the warmth behind her is gone, and he’s refilling her glass and his own, then taking it back to the kitchen table with him and resuming his scribbling. She’s still not used to the sight of him in the kitchen or the feel of the countertop against her back - the kitchen is a place for house elves. _Was_ a place for house elves. But elves, along with their apparition licenses, were among their many suspended privileges. And while all her every instinct railed indignantly against the thought of doing all the menial cooking and cleaning herself, some traitorous part of her was just grateful for something to do. 

She looks up at her son, watching the tremors of his scratching quill against the table throw the dim hearth light off the glass wine bottle, and thinks maybe she shouldn’t have invited him into her habits. She had just thought to offer the only comfort she could come up with these days. Perhaps the Malfoy men weren’t as susceptible to a habit, but the Blacks? She couldn’t name a single one who couldn’t be found consoling themself at the bottom of a bottle. Even her sisters, as radically opposite as it was possible to be... except for their partiality to expensive red wine. Except for that one night when Bella had nicked a few bottles from their Aunt Walburga’s wine cellar to split with her little sisters. It was the first time Narcissa had drank properly, past the heat in her throat from a few sips at a dinner party under her parents' watchful eyes, and she thinks the first time for Andy too. Probably not for Bella. 

“Cheers,” she thinks wryly, taking a swig, “to you two nutters.” To Bella, her confidant of so many years, who was dead now - and who, to be honest, had become so unhinged since her time in Azkaban that even Narcissa had struggled to trust her in the end. And to Andy, who had been so far off the other side of the deep end for almost as long as she could remember. They hadn’t spoken since she’d run off to London with the... _muggle-born_ twenty years ago, but Narcissa still kept note of every word she heard about her, even when she didn’t mean to. Last she heard her sister had outlived her husband, daughter, and werewolf son-in-law, leaving her to raise a newborn grandson by herself. 

She wonders if her sister feels as alone as she does. 

Perhaps it’s too late. Her estranged sister wouldn’t want to hear from her after twenty years of brick-walled silence. But perhaps neither of them have so many friends, and certainly not so many family, left that they can afford to shut out the few who are still left standing after the war. 

“Draco, dear?” 

He looks up.

“When you go to London... would you deliver a letter for me? You’ve got a cousin there who might need looking after once in a while. If you wanted to.” 

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading! i know this fic isn't exactly groundbreaking but idk i just really fkn love the malfoys, especially narcissa. and i'm sure someone will tar and feather me for saying so but imo they should have been the "shifty secondary antagonist whose only redeeming quality is their love for another" blueprint rather than sn*pe because uhhhhh their love was actually mutual and not creepy! and i know they're not Good Guys obviously especially lucius but like i'm gonna refer to that post from tumblr user dracoluicus: 
> 
> "u wanna know what i cant stop thinking about today??? lucius and narcissa malfoy didn’t even have wands when they were running around looking for draco during the battle of hogwarts. voldemort broke lucius’s and narcissa gave hers to draco. and more people probably want to kill them than ANYONE else there, they’re hated by both sides at this point. lucius, one of the most well known and hated death eaters and narcissa, who voldemort now knows lied to his face about his arch enemy being dead, just run into the biggest battle of the wizarding war screaming and drawing so much attention to themselves and they cant even defend themselves, but they literally don’t even care because all that matters to them is finding their son. like damn the malfoys have some of the strongest most devoted love in the entire series. they didn’t even have wands."
> 
> so yeah. idk maybe i just find them so realistic because i'm ~projecting~ my own shitty family onto them but anyway. thanks for reading hope you enjoyed! if you like angst about secondary antagonists' strained but devoted family relationships i got some stuff about azula and zuko from atla and cashmere and gloss from the hunger games u can check out (although be warned those ones have muuuuuch heavier dead-dove kinda themes, so proceed with caution) anyway love u guys thanks for reading


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